March 14, 2012
J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov
Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov
RELEASE: 12-082
NASA RELEASES NEW WISE MISSION CATALOG OF ENTIRE INFRARED SKY
WASHINGTON -- NASA unveiled a new atlas and catalog of the entire
infrared sky today showing more than a half billion stars, galaxies
and other objects captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
(WISE) mission.
"Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the
astronomical community," said Edward Wright, WISE principal
investigator at UCLA, who first began working on the mission with
other team members in 1998.
WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, and mapped the entire sky in 2010 with
vastly better sensitivity than its predecessors. It collected more
than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light,
capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies. Since
then, the team has been processing more than 15 trillion bytes of
returned data. A preliminary release of WISE data, covering the first
half of the sky surveyed, was made last April.
The WISE catalog of the entire sky meets the mission's fundamental
objective. The individual WISE exposures have been combined into an
atlas of more than 18,000 images covering the sky and a catalog
listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual
objects found in the images. Most of the objects are stars and
galaxies, with roughly equal numbers of each. Many of them have never
been seen before.
WISE observations have led to numerous discoveries, including the
elusive, coolest class of stars. Astronomers hunted for these failed
stars, called "Y-dwarfs," for more than a decade. Because they have
been cooling since their formation, they don't shine in visible light
and could not be spotted until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared
vision.
WISE also took a poll of near-Earth asteroids, finding there are
significantly fewer mid-size objects than previously thought. It also
determined NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest
near-Earth asteroids.
Other discoveries were unexpected. WISE found the first known "Trojan"
asteroid to share the same orbital path around the sun as Earth. One
of the images released today shows a surprising view of an "echo" of
infrared light surrounding an exploded star. The echo was etched in
the clouds of gas and dust when the flash of light from the supernova
explosion heated surrounding clouds. At least 100 papers on the
results from the WISE survey already have been published. More
discoveries are expected now that astronomers have access to the
whole sky as seen by the spacecraft.
"With the release of the all-sky catalog and atlas, WISE joins the
pantheon of great sky surveys that have led to many remarkable
discoveries about the universe," said Roc Cutri, who leads the WISE
data processing and archiving effort at the Infrared and Processing
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. "It will be exciting and rewarding to see the innovative
ways the science and educational communities will use WISE in their
studies now that they have the data at their fingertips."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages
and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's
Explorers Program, which is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the
Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was
built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo.
Science operations, data processing and archiving take place at the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For a collection of WISE images released to date, visit:
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html
An introduction and quick guide to accessing the WISE all-sky archive
for astronomers is online at:
http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/
For more information about WISE, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
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